Have you ever been to a recording at the BBC Radio Theatre?

[ArdeteiMasazxu]

I've applied for tickets to be in the audience for a recording of a one-off radio show - does anyone know how far ahead of the actual recording date the tickets are actually released? I am pretty sure there will be more applications than there are tickets to be issued, so I might not get the event tickets at all but I hope I will be lucky.

At the moment I can get train tickets into London on the date in question quite cheap advanced, but those cheaper tickets will disappear once it gets closer to the recording date. It's almost worth buying the train tickets now just in case, if I am not going to know if I have the event tickets until a week before the show then my train could be £60 more expensive each by then, but if I will have at least 3 weeks notice then the train tickets might only be £10 each more by then, and if that's the case then it's probably better to hold off getting the train tickets for a little longer.

So if you know roughly what the timescale is that would be really helpful. The autoreply email from the application just says "This email does not guarantee you will receive tickets. If your application is successful tickets will be emailed to you in advance of the show/event date." - which isn't helpful as "in advance of" could just mean the day before.

Hopeful bump. Surely there's a reasonably big intersection between mumsnetters and Radio4 listeners!

I went in March. My tickets came through 10 days before the event - I don't think there was another email before that confirming that I'd got them, I think it was just a 'you got in and here are your tickets'.
That wasn't for a one off though, it was for Just a Minute, which records 4 times per series, so probably 16 times a year maybe.

They do over book, and issue more tickets than there are seats. I don't know how many by. So you need to get there early and queue to validate your ticket (and convert it into a seat, in effect).

I imagine that ticket applications hugely exceed numbers of available seats though. I was trying for Question of Sport tickets for years before I got lucky. And for radio shows, if I lived/worked in London I would apply for LOADS - imagine all the free entertainment you could enjoy after work, it would be fab.

Unless there's something else you could do in London instead, I wouldn't risk booking train tickets too far out.